This essay introduces Inhabiting Cultures, a special issue of the Journal of American Studies. The guest editors, idea collective John Q, examine the relationship between method and academic writing by riding a train as a public editorial act and a way of practicing empathy in public scholarship. Contributors to this issue produce the very kinds of culture they critique. John Q tracks these activities as the careful handling of particular kinds of cultural production with a critical and ethical aim.

This essay uses a quilt made from used Ku Klux Klan regalia to examine the complicated interpersonal relationships and internal ambivalence that have emerged in the process of the author's study of Klan material culture. Concerns about the relationship between preserving objects and preserving ideology emerge through the process of untangling the story of this enigmatic object.

In 2019, US-based African American artist Dread Scott will present his new performative work, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, just outside the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. It will be a re-performance of the German Coast uprising of 1811, one of the largest rebellions of enslaved people in US history. It is the most recent installment in a slowly growing historical body of knowledge about this little-known history. The story is about a radical idea of freedom that Scott seeks to enliven through recruiting the performers. The potential for organizing and future networks is at the heart of this effort. This text is based upon Joey Orr's interview with Dread Scott on Thursday 12 May 2016, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

From 2010 to 2015, Pocket Guide to Hell, a series of public history projects in Chicago, produced site-specific, participatory historical reenactments with the intention of treating the past as if it were a public space – an inhabitable site where multiple voices can be heard, meanings contested, and alliances forged. This paper narrates the process behind the production of the final Pocket Guide to Hell project, which marked the centennial of the Arts Club of Chicago, in order to reflect upon the origins of creative acts, the challenges of cocreation, and the possibilities and limitations of the reenactment form.

A creative collective, I'm Making A Boy Band (IMMABB) discuss the issues of postcolonialism and identity/gender politics surrounding the transnational circulation of K-pop by sharing their process of making a non-Korean K-pop idol group called EXP in New York in the form of an experimental “how-to” manual. They also talk about the possibilities of fandom in relation to feminism and sexuality by using an in-depth analysis of the K-pop industry as well as themselves whilst blurring the line between fine art and pop culture.

This essay is the foreword to an artistic inquiry into immigrant Chinese life in rural nineteenth-century California – a communal life that was itinerant, vulnerable, preyed upon, resilient, and centrally important in the state's and the nation's history. The project integrates new photographs of the remnants of Chinese settlements in the Sierra Nevada foothills and the Sacramento delta areas into a forgotten governmental account of Chinese immigrants, made by D. D. Beatty in Downieville, c.1894. The result is a remade book, part document, part poetic archaeology.

In a powerful but frequently overlooked passage in The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon describes expressive culture as a register of incipient social relations. He maintains that long before liberation struggles assume organized political form, perceptive observers will detect the emergence of unusual kinds of expression popping up to summon the people to view the status quo as both unreal and unacceptable.1 The essays in this special issue dedicated to the theme of Inhabiting Cultures display precisely this evidence of incipient critique and transformation. They demonstrate that tomorrow is today; that the reigning cultural forms authored and authorized by domination, exclusion and oppression have become exhausted and obsolete; and that the stirrings of a new world in the making are already here.

Envisioning Harlem's future served as a particularly vivid means of addressing the dilemmas posed by the prospect of desegregation. Should black peoplehood – in part a legacy of oppression and racialization – persist in a post-segregation era? This article calls for greater attention to be paid to the visions of future existence that animated, and were animated by, the black freedom struggles of the 1960s. It explores contrasting architectural reimaginings of Harlem and argues that ideas about existing black places and the nature of their built environment were important factors in shaping commitments to, and idealizations of, both integrationist and black nationalist futures.

This project scrutinizes the law and its relation to violence. It reassesses the parameters for discerning a state of emergency. It investigates state violence, crisis production and enemy designation, to elucidate implicit and coded state violence enacted in African American communities in the contemporary US. Specifically, this text considers states of emergency that are not exceptions to the rule, but rather integral to the ideology behind, and the formation of, the rule (i.e. the legal, economic, educational and political institutions of the nation).

Evangelical rap may sound like an oxymoron, but it was one of the most important trends in evangelical America as the Christian right rose to new levels of power in the 1990s. The trio DC Talk sold millions of album and dominated the Christian charts from the early 1990s and into the early 2000s. This was more than pure entertainment. Popular culture, and especially popular culture targeted at teens, is an important venue for disseminating values and sustaining religious identities. The artists promoted by the Christian music industry have to reflect the ideas and values that parents and central evangelical institutions wish to teach their children. In the 1990s, racial reconciliation was one of the most important issues to evangelical America and DC Talk were poster boys for a multiracial and multicultural America. Therefore this article takes DC Talk as a starting point to discuss evangelical engagement with race issues in the 1990s. DC Talk wrapped up evangelical individualism and color-blind conservatism in hip-hop garb, trying to reinvent a group with a checkered past when it comes to race relations as the hope of a racially harmonious America.

In the early Cold War, the US government institutionalized a national security program, centered on the investigation into the political beliefs of federal employees, to safeguard the nation from Communist subversion. Often interpreted as the result of a partisan battle between New Deal Democrats and conservative Republicans, the national security program had deeper origins, reflecting the influence of psychiatric discourse on public understandings of deviancy. Framed by a metonymical logic that linked radical political beliefs, deviant sexual behaviors, and other illicit behaviors under the category of psychopathology, the security program sought to guard against the threat posed by potentially dangerous individuals, a form of protection that necessitated the public disclosure by those deemed security risks of all aspects of their personal lives.

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W. E. B. Du Bois described African American music as a “gift” to America, contesting the tendency to regard white interest in black culture as appropriation or theft. Yet this metaphor invoked the complex circuits of indebtedness and obligation that are intrinsic to gift exchange in anthropological accounts of the practice, challenging white recipients of the gift to make adequate response. This challenge is most systematically addressed in a sequence of films that tell stories about white enthusiasm for the blues. The Blues Brothers (1980), Crossroads (1986), Blues Brothers 2000 (1998) and Black Snake Moan (2006) depict the blues as a gift and explore how whites might appropriately acknowledge and reciprocate for receiving it in a culture distorted by racial inequalities. The films develop a distinct set of narrative conventions for handling the politics of racial obligation, vacillating between seeing black music as a transracial cultural resource on the one hand and as a racially defined, inalienable possession of African Americans on the other. Using these same conventions, Honeydripper (2007) invites us to see the process of cultural exchange from a different perspective in which the problematic status of the blues as racialized property is diminished.